Pinning down Pynchon

"What is Against the Day about?" asked Sam Leith in the Spectator, reviewing the long-awaited new novel by Thomas Pynchon. "What is it not about? To try to summarise the plot would be insanity. It is a comedy of ideas with people in it. Describing it as if it were a realist novel would be like trying to transcribe in musical notation the sound of a piano falling down the stairs ... It is virtuoso nonsense; it is a giant shaggy dog story, serious as history; it is by turns mind-crushingly tedious and utterly exhilarating; it is remorselessly facetious and yet deeply moving. It is like watching the European apocalypse as scripted by Looney Toons. It is brilliant, but it is exhaustingly brilliant ... It drags, it forces you to struggle, but it does so for its cumulative effect. There's a wonderful, gathering tenderness - and Pynchon writes some of the most beautiful sentences you are ever likely to come across."

"A massive engine, depending on its size for its aesthetic the way some rock bands depend on loudness, Against the Day takes a while to build momentum," observed Michael Moorcock in the Daily Telegraph. However, "by page 550, when he brings you to the novel's melancholy heart, Pynchon has you firmly in the palm of his Barnum-like fist ... We stagger out of this one man World's Fair with our hearts and our sides splitting. Against the Day is a fine example of a successful marriage between the popular and the intellectual, between fiction and science ... Give this book your time - you'll agree it's worth it."

"It's too big, too broad, too stuffed with competing storylines, whirligig digressions and the operations of authorial whim to permit of a continuous conception of character," objected Tim Martin in the Independent on Sunday. "The prevailing impression is of incremental chaos, of information piling up with no egress in narrative. It's worth noting, too, that the jokes have gone rather flat ... and even the song-and-dance numbers that punctuate the text - previously a speciality - can seem like the work of a jaded pasticheur ... Against the Day is a startlingly discontinuous novel, a work of full-spectrum intelligence and erudition that is at times bafflingly tiresome and ungenerous to the reader."

"The text is overwhelming, unstable, encyclopaedic and extravagantly allusive," agreed David Gale in the Observer. "At times, the author seems burdened with a surfeit of research material and discharges it, at regular intervals, into long, scene-setting paragraphs that simply list the contents of rooms or environments." However, "None of this detracts from the unique pleasures of a mighty novel that will delight Pynchonians and seduce newcomers. The latter should be prepared to put about a month aside at two hours a day, five days a week."